On the NetTuts.com site today they've posted a new tutorial showing you how you can use WordPress with HHVM now that they're 100% compatible.

Over the past few months HHVM has taken the PHP community by storm. Since WordPress 3.9 was released, HHVM is now 100% compatible with WordPress.

Unfortunately, HHVM is not quite ready for use in production in self-hosted environments. In my experience, HHVM crashes about once per day, which makes it not viable for a site where high availability is important. Recently, WP Engine has released project Mercury which seamlessly allows HHVM to gracefully fail by falling back to PHP 5.5 when it fails. In this article, we're going to install HHVM on an Ubuntu server running the latest LTS release, 14.04.

They walk you through the full process including:

installing MySQL

Installing Nginx

Installing HHVM

Setting up and configuring them all to play nicely with WordPress

It's a pretty short article and doesn't get into the specifics of the WordPress setup steps past ensuring it's working with HHVM but it does give a good starting place.

Derick Rethans has posted a new article in his series highlighting some of the changes in the latest release of Xdebug (v2.3). In this new post he talks about some of the improvements in the trace file functionality.

Trace files are a way to document every function call, and if you enable it, variable assignment and function's return values - including when these functions were called, and how much memory PHP was using at the moment of function entry (and exit). Xdebug 2.3 adds a new type of parameter rendering for stack traces and function traces through the xdebug.collect_params setting.

This new setting allows much more information to be reported back in the trace results, adding on a serialized version of the value of variables. He also shows the output results (human-readable) that shows the memory usage and time index for the execution. He also shows the new handling to include return values in the trace output using the "xdebug.trace_format" handling.

Christopher Pitt has posted a new article on Medium.com about when an "array is like an adventure" when in the context of co-operative PHP multitasking. In it he shows how to make code work asynchronously with out the use of extensions, only generators.

Last week I got the opportunity to share recent work with my colleagues, at SilverStripe. I was going to present Async PHP today, but since I covered ReactPHP last week; I decided to talk about something slightly different. So here's a post about cooperative multitasking.

He starts with some basic arrays and other things that act like them and can be iterated through (Traversable). He talks about implementing custom iterators to act the same way and the use of IteratorAggregate to "cheat" a bit when making them. The he gets into generators, showing how they can be used to iterate similarly. He shows how it's possible to send data to a generator, throwing exceptions inside them and the use of "coroutines" to create asynchronous code. He builds up a queue system with this method and shows how they execute with some simple echo output. He also shows the use of RecoilPHP, another coroutine-based library, to replace the main kernel for a ReactPHP script. He also mentions IcicleIO as another option.

In a new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorcshares the results of the PHP framework survey the site posted a month back. In it they asked developers for their opinions on favorite frameworks (not necessarily the one they use, but their own personal opinion). For anyone that's been keeping up with the current state of PHP frameworks, the results aren't all that surprising though.

One month ago, we started the annual SitePoint framework popularity survey. Now that the month has expired, it's time to look at the results and to distribute the prizes. The response was a whopping ~7800 entries, far more than any other survey we've held so far, and even after filtering out invalid entries we end up with a formidable number of valid participants.

According to the results the most popular framework, by far, was Laravel. Coming in second was Symfony2 and third the Nette framework. They did ask for different opinions for personal versus business choices but the results track the same between the two. He also splits out the data into the top results by country and by the age of the people who responded.

He finishes off the post with some of his own thoughts on why Laravel was the clear winner with only some of it having to do with the framework itself. He points out the related projects, "near perfect documentation" and other things (like Laravel's own subreddit). He suggests that, even though open source and "free" tend to go together, spending money and a good amount of time on a project can help ensure it succeeds. He also offers some practical advice for those wanting to give their project a boost:

Spread the word, analyze solutions from other people, discuss them. Be open, be transparent. Have an official blog, get a StackOverflow tag, justify your decisions, get in touch with popular publications which can help promote your framework if you present it well enough.

The GoPHP7-ext project aims to ensure that all the known PHP extensions out there work with the upcoming PHP 7. This is non-trivial as some significant changes have occurred in the core PHP engine (related to performance) that mean that extensions need to be updated. In order to help out (and prepare my own PHP code for PHP 7!), I needed the latest version of PHP7 working in a vagrant VM. Fortunately Rasmus has created a such a VM called php7dev, so let's start there.

He walks you through the process of grabbing the latest version of the virtual machine and set it up as a Vagrant VM instance. He talks about the different PHP versions contained in the VM and how to update PHP 7 to the latest pre-release version. Finally he talks about building an extension on the VM (he uses the apfd extension) and how to configure the VM to be able to test your own code too.

The ServerGrove blog has a new post today introducing the new Symfony Installer, a tool that can make getting started with a Symfony2 application quick and easy.

Yesterday, the Symfony team introduced the new Symfony installer. Its main goal is to help developers to create Symfony projects faster. Until now, installing Symfony to start a new project required a few steps. [...] The installer tries to do this in one step. It downloads a compressed file with all the code, including the vendors directory, so you don't need anything else to run Symfony for the first time.

The post shows you how to install the installer via a curl call to fetch the executable. They show how to use it to create a new project, making a demo project and the resulting application and web interface for the demo. They also mention some of the future work that's planned for the installer including HTTPS support and caching improvements. The post finishes up with a quick mention of the code "under the hood" using the Symfony console component.